Word: thief
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...verdict is in, and it's unanimous. Says one self-proclaimed larcenist, "The Coop should get smarter about how they deal with security." Another shoplifter declares that the Coop has "one of the most inept security systems in the world." Yet another petty thief uses the Coop's laxity to rationalize her crimes. "I do it partly for them [the Coop]... It's sort of like Nietzsche--'Punish the weak'...They really should crack down...
...when Gerry and three other Irish friends are held in a London jail for seven days without being informed of their charges, he begins a saga that will prove this petty thief to possess a greater moral conscience than the representatives of the British police and judicial system. Mercilessly abused during questionings, they eventually learn they are accused of bombing a pub in Guildford. However, they are innocent: "We didn't even have the bus fare to Guildford even if we had known where it was," Gerry recalls. By the time the case is brought to court, the "Guildford Four...
Jean Genet could be hard on his public. "I don't have readers," he once lamented, "but thousands of voyeurs." He might have added that it was he who raised the blinds and staged the spectacle -- a rabbity-looking thief rhapsodizing about transvestites and jailyard toughs. Not even the revered felons of French literary tradition, the poetes maudits from Villon to Rimbaud, had been so devoted to the triumvirate of personal virtues -- thievery, homosexuality and betrayal -- in Genet's great novels. First the French, then the world, couldn't tear their eyes away...
...wrote Miracle of the Rose and The Thief's Journal was no sunny gay poet like Walt Whitman. When he celebrated himself, it was a tangle of paradoxes he pointed to. His chief delight was his own abjection. His notion of Utopia was a cellblock of masters and servants, preferably locked in a bear hug. He left little record of how his novels, written mostly in prison, developed. Though White doesn't penetrate all Genet's mysteries -- such as how a foster child who spent much of his adolescence in a reformatory became one of the supreme stylists in French...
...hold true in his case. By the time he died in 1986 -- of cancer, at the age of 75 -- Genet was revered as one of the greatest 20th century French writers. But White's book reminds us that Cocteau was right when he said Genet was a bad thief. Nothing he stole could compare in value with what he left behind...